SOURCE: Reddy, Maureen T. “The Feminist Counter Tradition in Crime: Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson.” In The Cunning Craft, edited by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer, pp. 174-87. Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1990.

[In the following essay, Reddy examines the genre of the feminist crime novel, focusing on four major novelists—including Grafton—within the genre, and considers the genre's potential new directions.]

When Carolyn Heilbrun published her first mystery novel under the name Amanda Cross in 1964, she began the revival of the feminist crime novel, a literary form that had been moribund since the publication in 1935 of Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night. In the Last Analysis, the first Amanda Cross book, appeared just a year after Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique brought feminist issues back to public attention, following Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex by nearly two decades.¹ Heilbrun was doubly important in what has come to be known as the “second wave” of feminism: as Carolyn Heilbrun, she produced some of the earliest and most influential feminist literary criticism, while as Amanda Cross she brought a feminist perspective to the crime novel, significantly altering the genre. Feminist literary criticism, feminism as a social movement, and feminist crime novels have grown up together, so to speak. Just as feminist literary criticism challenges the traditional assumptions of the discipline of literary studies, so too does the feminist crime novel challenge the conventions of crime fiction. Feminist crime novels are best understood as constituting a new genre, less part of an existing tradition than a distinct counter-tradition.² As this counter-tradition develops, expands, and deepens, numerous shared features and variations on those features become discernible.

In this essay I focus on four recent additions to established series—Sara Paretsky's Blood Shot (1988), Amanda Cross's A Trap for Fools (1989), Sue Grafton's “F” Is for Fugitive (1989), and Barbara Wilson's The Dog Collar Murders (1989)—in order to assess the current condition of the feminist crime novel, its characteristic preoccupations, and its new directions. Each of these four novels fits within the genre of feminist crime fiction, but also belongs to a particular sub-genre: Paretsky's and Grafton's series focus on professional private investigators, Cross's on an academic amateur, and Wilson's on a lesbian amateur. Exceptionally popular among mystery readers, these four writers have also been singled out for critical attention and praise in both the popular and the academic press.

Although the four series are at quite different stages of development—A Trap for Fools is the ninth novel featuring Kate Fansler in twenty-five years, while “F” Is for Fugitive is the sixth Kinsey Millhone novel since 1982, Blood Shot the fifth V. I. Warshawski novel since 1982, and The Dog Collar Murders just the third Pam Nilsen book since 1984—all are late enough in their respective series so that the detectives’ characters are well established. This is not to say that Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson fail to develop their detectives’ characters further in these novels, but simply that the novels build upon foundations established in earlier books in the series. Cross's Kate Fansler, for instance, has worked through crises in confidence and gone through a revolution in her (and her creator's) conception of her role as a woman professor and detective in earlier novels (Reddy 50-66). Similarly, Paretsky has explored her hero's reasons for working as a detective, her family background, and her professional experience in the four preceding Warshawski novels, while Grafton's [“A” Is for Alibi] through [“E” Is for Evidence] books provide information on Kinsey's personal history and her current pared-down lifestyle. Wilson detailed Pam's coming out as a lesbian in Murder in the Collective (1984) and explored some of the personal and political implications of that choice in Sisters of the Road (1986). At this particular moment in all four series, the detectives are presented as having achieved some level of self-acceptance and as having developed strategies for negotiating their social worlds. Concomitantly, the authors have attained critical and commercial success sufficiently to justify assuming a readership familiar with their earlier work. Finally, that readership presumably has acquired some degree of familiarity and comfort with the detectives.

The plot of each novel, like most other crime fiction, follows the progress of an investigation, initially galvanized by a murder and propelled forward by the detective's (and the reader's) desire to discover the author of the crime. However, the investigation of all but “F” Is for Fugitive rapidly shifts into a larger, explicitly feminist investigation of social conditions under patriarchy. With the exception of Grafton's criminal, each of the murderers turns out to be linked in some fairly direct way to an institution that oppresses women; the murder is shown to have been precipitated by the murderer's fear of exposure of wrongdoing and consequent loss of status and power within that institution. Grafton's murderer is a woman who is excluded from these institutions because of gender, with this exclusion sparking in her a consuming rage that finally leads her to kill. In all these novels, feminism is presented as the only frame of reference adequate to understanding and critiquing both the particular crime and the larger social issue, and as the only ideology capable of offering an alternative to the corrupt social system from which the crimes arise. The four authors thus adopt a stance akin to that recently articulated by feminist standpoint theorists: “a standpoint is an engaged vision of the world opposed and superior to dominant ways of thinking. … [A] feminist standpoint is a superior vision produced by the political conditions and distinctive work of women” (Ruddick 129). Feminism, then, is accorded a privileged position in the four narratives. Feminism is the source of each detective's authority and therefore of her power, while each murderer's corrupt definition and destructive use of power is rooted in patriarchal, capitalist ideology, which is seen finally to lack legitimate authority.

Paretsky, Grafton, Cross, and Wilson root their novels in the insights afforded by a feminist standpoint and construct their plots within the framework of a feminist critique of society. Like other feminists, the four authors understand that all knowledge is constructed and contextual, and that all reading is gendered.³ Wilson may assume an almost exclusively feminist readership, given that her detective is a lesbian and her novels are published as trade paperbacks by a small press (Seal) and sold mainly by independent booksellers. Grafton's, Cross's, and Paretsky's novels, however, are published by large commercial houses, first in hardback and then in mass-market paperback editions, and sold both by independents and by the large chains. I doubt that any of the three assumes her entire audience will be feminist. Despite these differences, by writing as feminists and by creating feminist detectives, all four novelists teach their readers to read as feminists, to look on the world—at least temporarily—from a feminist perspective.

Elsewhere, I have argued that Cross and others teach their readers how to read as women, either by focusing on the female detective's thought processes or by taking the reader through a form of consciousness raising (Reddy 12-15). Work by Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, and Jessica Benjamin suggests that women's socialization, particularly early relations with a mother who acts as primary caretaker, results in an understanding of the self and of the self's relation to others considerably different from men's. Historically, though, male ways of thinking have been dominant in society. Taken together, Gilligan, Chodorow, and Benjamin offer an analysis of gender differences that centers on modes of relatedness, with men tending to define themselves through individuation and separation, valuing autonomy over connections with others, and perceiving relationships in terms of rights and rules, and women tending instead to define themselves in relation to others, valuing interpersonal connections over autonomy, and perceiving relationships in terms of balancing needs.⁴ Given these characteristic gender differences, one might expect that a woman detective would understand her role quite differently than would a male detective, and that she would have difficulty with traditional notions of truth and justice. These expectations are in fact borne out in feminist crime novels. The four novels I discuss here problematize the conventions of crime fiction, operating as practical applications of feminist standpoint theory.

Feminist crime writers accept few of the givens of traditional detective fiction. By calling into question that which is taken for granted in other crime novels—the value of detecting, the knowability of the truth, the detective's commitment to solving the crime, the reader's interest in deciphering clues and solving the puzzle, the detective's superior authority, the primacy of reason—feminist writers push readers to question their own assumptions about the genre. The detective's motives are always more centrally at issue in feminist crime novels than they are in conventional mysteries. Whereas nonfeminist writers usually assign their detectives some version of the common motive of commitment to order, justice, and truth, feminist crime writers generally problematize both the universality and the desirability of these abstractions. There is no single, universal truth, these writers suggest; rather, truth is always relative, dependent on perspective and on circumstances. Order, for instance, is frequently presented as the source of crimes against women and therefore as the antithesis of real justice. Further, there may often be higher values than abstract truth or justice, such as preserving lives and relationships.⁵

Consequently, the most commonly used motive for a feminist detective's entering into an investigation is a very personal stake of some sort: the detective detects in order to protect a friend or at the request of a friend. Even those characters who are professional investigators, such as Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski, usually are assigned motives beyond the requirements of the job. In Blood Shot, for instance, V. I. begins the case at the request of an old friend. Only Kinsey Millhone acts strictly as a paid professional; at the beginning of “F” Is for Fugitive a man hires her to clear his son, who has been arrested for a murder committed sixteen years before. At least initially, Kinsey has no connection beyond employer/employee with the family whose lives she enters. In the first two Pam Nilsen novels, Barbara Wilson carefully constructed compelling personal motives for Pam's investigations, but in The Dog Collar Murders the reader is left to puzzle out Pam's motives. Actually, in this book Pam herself isn't sure why she investigates. Her twin sister suggests that Pam should involve herself because “we know for sure the police are going to make a botch-up of the whole thing” (55). Ultimately, Pam's motive seems to be compounded of curiosity, boredom, and desire to divert her thoughts away from problems with her lover. This novel lacks the sense of urgency Wilson artfully creates in the two earlier Nilsen novels; I think a major reason for the calmer, cooler tone of this book is Pam's unconvincing motivation. Both the author and her character seem much more interested in exploring the various feminist positions in the pornography debate than they are in investigating the murder of anti-porn activist Loie Marsh, resulting in a lack of plot balance that seriously undermines the novel.

The detective's authority—indeed, the nature of authority itself—becomes a subject of inquiry in most feminist crime novels. Conventional crime novels treat the (male) detective as the single authority capable of satisfactorily and fully explaining the meaning of events and encourage readers to accept this authority figure's right to define truth. Women's authority is always in question, though, and it is therefore always a struggle for a woman to establish herself as an authority in any area, as authority is popularly associated with masculinity. Grafton alone among these four novelists treats authority as relatively uncomplicated, with her narrator/protagonist presenting authority as a matter of knowing enough to be able to write “the proper ending to the tale” (1) of violent death she is hired to investigate. The wording here—“the proper ending”—suggests some ambiguity, though: “proper” by what standards and in relation to what other possible endings? Most feminist crime writers doubly problematize authority: on the one hand, they question the entire concept of authority, while on the other they assert the female detective's authority. Traditionally, authority—the power to judge, the right to command, the power to persuade based on knowledge or experience—inheres in the masculine role, with that role part of a social structure based on male superiority. From a feminist standpoint, authority based on such a structure is necessarily illegitimate. Feminist crime writers lay bare this illegitimacy and offer different bases of authority, most often an understanding rooted in relatedness, empathy, and care. The feminist detective does not occupy a masculine position; on the contrary, she establishes her authority on entirely different grounds.

The question of authority is broached in A Trap for Fools before the novel proper begins, with the entire text of Rudyard Kipling's “If” serving as epigraph for the book. Although deadly serious in tone, Kipling's poem—from which the novel's title also derives—is transformed into bitter irony through its context: it is impossible to encounter this poem between the covers of a feminist crime novel and read it “straight,” which requires reading it as a man. The poem consists of a series of conditions, beginning with “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” all of which share a single conclusion: “Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!” Cross's novel undercuts both the poem's construction of gender and its conventionally gendered notion of authority. The novel suggests that Kipling mistook a condition for a conclusion: if you are a man (more accurately, a white man), then “Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.” Kate Fansler does meet most of the poem's conditions, but she can never “be a Man,” and therefore “the Earth and everything that's in it” cannot be hers. At novel's end, Kate does get some power in the world, but she does so only by forfeiting legitimate feminist authority.

Power, in fact, is one reason that Kate agrees to become involved in the murder investigation in A Trap for Fools. Asked by the administrators of her university to investigate the murder of a widely detested professor, Kate at first refuses. The lone woman administrator, Edna Hoskins, persuades Kate to change her answer by offering to share information and therefore power with her: “my colleagues feel that to give away information is to give away power; I believe in an institution where shared information leads to shared power and responsibility” (10). The first bit of power/information Edna offers is the fact that the police suspect a friend of Kate's, a black professor named Humphrey Edgerton. Kate pushes on with the investigation in order to clear her friend—a familiar motive—but also to learn how the university really works, which by the administrators’ definition means acquiring power. Cross gives Kate another reason to pursue the case when a student Kate likes becomes the murderer's second victim. Earlier in the novel, Kate thinks that “it was easier to seek wholeheartedly the murderer of someone you have liked, someone whose loss is evident, a general diminution of the humane” (19); seeking Arabella's killer is in that sense easier than seeking Professor Adams', although, as it happens, the same person committed both crimes.

The criminals in three novels hold powerful positions in institutions that oppress women: a fundamentalist church; a prestigious university, government, organized crime, and big business (with these last three portrayed as very nearly identical). The authors demonstrate that their crimes are neither aberrational nor violations of order, but extreme expressions of the institutions’ values, logical outgrowths of an order built on the oppression of women. The criminals share, indeed act upon, the true values of the institutions they represent; Cross, Paretsky, and Wilson show that these values—money and power over others’ lives—are dangerous to women and to other living things. Paretsky most graphically represents the interrelationship of social institutions, including the family, in a corrupt system of power, first by creating a conspiracy among representatives of business, government, and organized crime, and then by revealing one man to be a child molester, an abusive father and husband, a dishonest businessman, and a corrupt city father. This character, Art Jurshak, symbolizes patriarchy itself.

Just as the criminals in these novels may be used as representatives of the institutions of which they are a part and as figures for patriarchal capitalism in general, so too their victims serve symbolic functions as well. In The Dog Collar Murders, the victims, Loie and Nicky, are lesbian feminists who refuse to maintain silence about their experience and who insist on the authority of that experience. The victims in Blood Shot are Nancy, who works for a non-profit neighborhood environmental agency, and Louisa, who has been doubly victimized, first by sexual abuse and then by industrial pollution. While the murdered Nancy represents women who directly threaten masculine control, the slowly dying Louisa represents both silent female victims of abuse and workers, both male and female, who lack control over their working conditions and who involuntarily sacrifice their lives for the sake of corporate profit.

Cross's victims in A Trap for Fools fall into two distinct categories: an utterly unsympathetic white male professor and a far more sympathetic black woman student. Both, however, collude in their own victimization by attempting to gain power through blackmail, Professor Adams for the “wrong” reasons (personal power over others and personal financial gain) and Arabella Jordan for the “right” ones (greater political power for minority students). The victims’ motives thus are interestingly gendered, but their common fate suggests that accepting the traditional basis of power—secret knowledge—necessarily destroys, regardless of motive. Cross's criminals have similarly gendered motives: Vice-President Noble embezzles and then kills in order to amass power in the university, while Edna accepts money in exchange for silence in order to help her ailing husband. Cross suggests that Edna's and Arabella's motives are less reprehensible than Adams’ and Noble's, but portrays their actions as both self-destructive and destructive to their communities.

Cross's Edna is a victim of the misogynistic organization of power in the university for which she works. At several points in A Trap for Fools, we are reminded of Edna's isolation in an otherwise exclusively masculine administration. In earlier Kate Fansler novels and in her scholarly work, Cross/Heilbrun has emphasized the importance of women's entering male-dominated institutions in large numbers if they are to avoid being “co-opted as honorary members of a male club” (Heilbrun 32).⁶ Edna's isolation ultimately leads her to act in a way contrary both to her original feminist principles and to her own best interest: she is co-opted into a male club in which money, power, and secrecy are highly valued.

Grafton's criminal is also a victim: a daughter in a family that, like the wider society, most values sons and a plain woman in a world in which pleasing men is the crucial test of femininity and the surest road to social success. Ann kills three people (all women), sets up the murder of a fourth, and allows her brother to go to prison for a crime she committed, all so that she can possess the man she desires. “F” Is for Fugitive suggests that being an unrewarded good daughter and an ordinary “old maid” literally made Ann crazy. By accepting dominant social values instead of recognizing their falseness and repudiating them, Ann colludes in her own victimization, with this collusion graphically represented at the novel's end when Ann, struggling with her father for a gun, actually shoots off her own foot. Ann blames her father for her crimes—“You were never there for me … you were never there,” she sobs to him—and Kinsey accepts this analysis, linking Ann to other women in the novel's last few lines. She mentions several women, and then says:

None of us had survived the wounds our fathers inflicted all those years ago. Did he love us? How would we ever know? He was gone and he'd never again be what he was to us in all his haunting perfection. If love is what injures us, how can we heal?

(260)

The novel implies an answer to its own final question through the striking differences between Ann and Kinsey, particularly Kinsey's rejection of the anti-feminist values Ann accepts.

At some level, crime novels are always about secrets, about uncovering what is at first hidden, but secrecy itself becomes a central theme in The Dog Collar Murders, A Trap for Fools, and Blood Shot. The murderers in these novels act to preserve secrets, with those secrets always about sex and/or money: Wilson's Sonya kills in order to shield her past participation in porn films from public knowledge, as disclosure of her secret would threaten her livelihood as a Christian activist and speaker. Cross's ironically named Noble kills when he fears that his embezzlement of university funds will be made public. Paretsky's Jurshak, Dresberg, and Humboldt arrange and carry out one murder and plan several others in order to keep their insurance fraud secret, with Jurshak having the additional motive of hiding his past sexual abuse of his niece. The three novelists further suggest that secrecy is crucial for business-as-usual to be carried on in most institutions. Keeping silent, then, supports these institutions and, directly or indirectly, destroys women. This analysis is clearest in A Trap for Fools, in which Arabella becomes the murderer's second victim when she keeps his secret. The three novels offer insights similar to Adrienne Rich's in “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” and testify to the importance of breaking silence in altering the corrupt power base of the patriarchal order. Rich points out that “lying is done with words, and also with silence”: “Patriarchal lying has manipulated women both through falsehood and through silence. Facts we needed have been withheld from us. False witness has been borne against us” (186, 189).

The theme of silence and secrecy aiding corruption and opposing women's best interests works itself out in different ways in these novels, but is most complexly rendered in Blood Shot, where family silence about Art Jurshak's rape of Louisa is the enabling condition for his rise to power and his abuse of that power. Jurshak's entire life is built on lies, secrets, and silence. Like virtually all feminist crime novels—including “F” Is for Fugitive, in which Ann's crimes result from her acceptance of traditional ideas about women—these three link individual crimes to a wider social context, particularly to important feminist issues. As the detective investigates the crime, she also investigates the larger issue. In The Dog Collar Murders, the victims are women on either side of the pornography debate, a lesbian-feminist anti-porn activist and a lesbian-feminist S/M advocate. Pam, who as the novel opens hasn't thought much about the porn issue and is unsure of her own position, gets caught up in the debate. In A Trap for Fools, the central social issue, apart from the general theme of academe as corrupt, is racism, especially relations among white and black women. Cross here focuses on what has become in many ways the feminist issue: if feminism is to survive as a movement, white women and women of color must find common ground in order to work together on issues of mutual concern, yet the barriers to a cross-racial sisterhood are enormous and may sometimes appear insurmountable.⁷ Paretsky's Blood Shot foregrounds the issue of child sexual abuse, linking it with the problem of industrial pollution and effectively showing how precisely the same forces are responsible for both.

Although the connection between the particular crime on which the plot turns and the larger social issue with which the novel deals may seem most tenuous in Blood Shot, the novel actually quite successfully integrates the criminal investigation and the analysis of the larger social issue. Wilson, in contrast, runs into difficulties that Paretsky gracefully avoids. The major problems in Wilson's The Dog Collar Murders arise, ironically enough, from a virtue: the author's determination to render the pornography issue in feminism in its real complexity and ambiguity. Unfortunately, Wilson is not able to discover a dramatically satisfying way to conduct this exploration; further, it is difficult for readers to care deeply about Loie's demise when the detective herself seems detached, unaffected. Finally, the solution to the case—the answer to who killed Loie and later Nicky, and why—turns out not to depend on any of the subtleties of the porn wars, a fact which is liable to leave the reader wondering whether wading through multiple pages of exposition was necessary at all.

Roughly thirty pages of The Dog Collar Murders (chapters 3-5) are given over to reportage of a sexuality conference, with this material evidently intended to provide a framework for Pam's investigation. The experience of reading this section of the novel too often feels like attending an actual conference, especially because Wilson invents two fairly lengthy speeches, one examining why porn has become such a central issue among feminists and the other, by Loie, advocating censorship of porn. Neither speech is especially dynamic, nor does this section offer truly fresh insights into either the anti-pornography movement itself or porn's position as a major feminist issue. Loie turns up dead at the end of this section, and it later develops that an important clue to why she was murdered is embedded in her speech; nevertheless, the conference report, placed as it is quite early in the book, derails the novel, which never gets all the way back on track.

The murderer in The Dog Collar Murders turns out to be Sonya, a right-wing Christian anti-porn activist who killed Loie and Nicky to avoid public disclosure of her youthful participation in porn films. In a pattern used by other feminist crime writers who create female criminals, the murderer is a male-identified woman who acts on masculine motives (Reddy 31-32, 35-36). Wilson concludes the crime narrative of The Dog Collar Murders in a highly conventional way: Pam does not figure out the murderer's identity, instead narrowing the suspects down to a short list and then inviting all of them to a gathering at which she intends the murderer will be revealed. Sonya upsets Pam's plan by turning up early and endangering Pam's life. Ultimately, the police arrive and arrest Sonya, hauling her off for what we must assume will be trial and punishment. There's nothing especially feminist about this denouement. Even the conventions that other feminist crime novels, including Wilson's own first two, employ only to turn on their heads—the detective's failure to solve the puzzle and the threat to the detective's life, for instance—are used more straightforwardly here.

Wilson has Pam plan the meeting in a spirit of parody—as narrator, Pam asks, “If Hercule Poirot could carry it off, why couldn't I?” (184)—but the novel, as distinct from the character's thoughts and actions, does not parody the convention. Pam cannot “carry it off” because she is not all-knowing, not the single voice of authority Poirot is. After she has planned the meeting, Pam tells another character that were she ever to write a book, it “would be full of dead ends, tentative conclusions, backpedaling, outright wrong assumptions. I no sooner have one idea than another sounds better” (187). This is a fair description of Pam's investigative techniques, but also of Wilson's narrative technique in Murder in the Collective and Sisters of the Road; in fact, Pam's tolerance of ambiguity and Wilson's refusal to make her detective in the image of masculine authority figures contributes to the freshness of those novels. The Dog Collar Murders, however, founders at the end by removing all of Pam's authority and power.

Perhaps, though, that is part of a deliberate strategy, as surely is Wilson's decision to impair Pam's ability to fight back by burdening her with a baby, her three-month-old niece. Just as the murderer advances on her, Pam thinks, “We'd never discussed what to do in my self-defense class if you happened to have a thirteen-week-old baby on your hands” (191). However, women do often have children on their hands, and responsibility for children's safety certainly often impedes women's ability to defend themselves, both literally and metaphorically. Pam tries to escape, but then fights when she has no other choice, gaining strength from her determination to protect her niece: “suddenly my fear passed and I felt terribly angry. No one was going to hurt Antonia if I could help it” (193). Two women chance upon the fight and intercede, helping Pam.

Paretsky, Grafton, and Cross also endanger their detectives, but their handling of that motif differs considerably from Wilson's in The Dog Collar Murders. Cross has Kate brazen out a threat and just walk away, counting on the killer's cowardice and on a male ally's bravery to protect her. As in earlier Kinsey Millhone novels, Grafton portrays Kinsey as at ease with guns and reliant on a gun to equalize power between criminal and detective. At one point in “F” Is for Fugitive. Kinsey picks up her gun, “loving the smooth, cold weight of it” (193). However, Kinsey very seldom uses her gun in the series and, when she does, the gun sometimes proves ineffectual. In “E” Is for Evidence, for instance, Kinsey's purse and a toilet tank lid are better weapons against an attacker than is her gun. When Kinsey is threatened by Ann in “F” Is for Fugitive, she is taken by surprise and cannot get to her gun, instead using words to forestall Ann's attack. Although we see Kinsey physically fight off one attacker in “F” Is for Fugitive, this novel is far less violent than is Paretsky's Blood Shot. True to the hardboiled part of her ancestry, Paretsky's Warshawski gets beaten, kidnapped and left for dead by thugs, attacked by a gunwielding gangster, and threatened by a billionaire businessman. She fights off the thugs and survives their attack by using her wits, shoots the gangster, and calls the businessman's bluff. Paretsky's portrayal of violence implicitly questions the role of violence in hardboiled novels. Male hardboiled detectives may express distaste for violence, but their creators use violence to underscore the detective's masculinity. In Blood Shot, as in her earlier novels, Paretsky shows that violence is neither fixed in meaning nor an indication of masculinity. V. I. certainly cannot prove her femininity through violence, nor does violence establish her as masculine. Further, violence is always her last choice, and is frequently less effective than other forms of resistance. V. I. uses violence only when no other strategy will preserve her own or another character's life.

While the criminals in these novels generally act to acquire and then to preserve power as conventionally defined, the detectives usually act to protect relationships. Indeed, the primary shared value encoded by these texts is a form of preservative love,⁸ and the detectives’ morality consistently places concern for relationships ahead of such abstractions as order and justice. At the end of Blood Shot, V. I. rejects a businessman's attempt to buy her silence not simply on the grounds that assent would be morally wrong according to a hard and fast code, but because it would damage others she loves. Instead of abrogating to herself the authority to speak for others and to determine what is right for them, V. I. allows her friend Lotty to participate in the decision. Briefly, the situation is that Humboldt trumps up a charge of medical malpractice via sexual abuse against Lotty, offering to have the charges dropped and to give V. I. a substantial sum of money if she will give him the notebooks that contain evidence of his company's wrongdoing. V. I. contacts Lotty, explains the situation, and allows Lotty to speak for herself—acknowledges, in other words, Lotty's right to control her own life and to assert her own authority.

Relationships, familial and otherwise, are an important theme in feminist crime novels. Feminist crime writers depict their detectives’ struggles to create new forms of relatedness outside the boundaries of patriarchal nuclear families, a striking departure from the solitariness of male hardboiled detectives. The detectives seek deep and lasting connections while remaining wary of falling into roles that replicate conventional feminine family positions: daughter, sister, wife, mother, all defined primarily in relation to men, especially husband/father. Grafton's Kinsey enjoys being alone, but she also has several ongoing friendships, most notably one with her elderly landlord, Henry Pitts. At the end of “E” Is for Evidence (1988), Kinsey's apartment is destroyed by a bomb; as “F” Is for Fugitive begins, she is staying in a room of Henry's house and beginning to feel some “emotional claustrophobia” (11). In earlier books Kinsey has worried that Henry may want to play a fatherly role toward her, but in this more recent novel she has a sudden flash of insight that Henry actually wants to mother her. As the rest of the novel suggests, mothering is surely less damaging than fathering and may provide a comparatively benign model of relatedness, particularly if it is non-traditional mothering, outside patriarchal control. Wilson's The Dog Collar Murders opens with Pam directly addressing the issue of feminist relationships. We see her discomfort and downright anger with her sister's decision to marry, as this legalizing of a relationship is denied lesbians, including Pam. During the course of the novel, Pam tries to figure out what form she wants her relationship with her lover Hadley to take, determined to avoid simply replicating heterosexual conventions. Similarly, Paretsky's V. I. grapples with the question of what she truly owes her own friends and her mother's friends, and how she can reconcile her need for independence with her equal need for interdependence. At one point in Blood Shot, Lotty tells V. I. that she has been behaving irresponsibly, insisting on a degree of independence that threatens their friendship: “You involved me in your problems, and then you disappeared without a word. That isn't independence—that is thoughtless cruelty. … [If] you want to be friends, you cannot behave with such callous disregard for my feelings for you” (220-21). V. I. accepts Lotty's criticism, realizing that not all expressions of need are necessarily diminutions of her independence and that not all forms of dependence threaten the self. Ms. Chigwell, an older woman who has always accepted the notion that women's loyalties must lie with their fathers, husbands, or brothers, is inspired by V. I.'s example to shake free of her demanding brother and to begin, belatedly, her own life.

Although Cross asserts through Kate that women's friendships are of the greatest importance and demonstrates through Edna that the absence of such friendships may be deeply destructive, she fails to portray these friendships with any convincing degree of complexity or intensity. While Paretsky and Wilson both invent important women friends for their detectives, with several of these friendships carried throughout their series, the only ongoing intimate relationship Cross invents for Kate is with Reed Amhearst, her husband. In each of her recent novels, most notably No Word from Winifred (1986), Cross creates at least one supposedly intense and satisfying friendship between Kate and another woman, but none of these friends turns up in any other Cross novel. These friendships have no history and no future; therefore, the various comments in Cross's novels on the centrality of women's friendships in Kate's life have a hollow sound. Cross keeps claiming that such friendships are valuable, but never shows that they are. In A Trap for Fools, for instance, Kate spends a day with a novelist, Penelope Constable, at the end of which they feel “a sense of having known each other forever”:

They had covered every topic from contemporary fiction through the new opportunities of women's friendships and the perhaps concomitant greater impatience of women with stilted men, ending up with the state of England's economy and the extent to which it resembled the two nations of Disraeli's time.

(66)

This sense of closeness and community is temporary; Kate and Penelope share not a friendship, nor even the beginning of a friendship, but a day out of time, essentially separate from the rest of their lives.

Cross also depicts Kate as concerned about the distance between black and white women, their mutual mistrust, but this concern largely takes the form of an aggrieved belief that she has been misjudged. Outrageously, Kate blames black women as a group for making her uncomfortable. Regretting that “she had no black woman friend as close as Humphrey,” Kate thinks, “These women seemed to have condemned her in advance to an eliteness that her presence, apart from her actions, seemed inevitably to bespeak” (92). Kate's position, sadly, is one too widely shared by white feminists (see Lorde 124-33), but Cross presents it uncritically. The lack of irony in this passage suggests that Cross herself believe Kate's attitude to be reasonable, instead of recognizing it as a problem.

This blind spot regarding black and white women's relationships extends to most relationships among women, of whatever race, in Cross's novels. At midpoint in A Trap for Fools, Kate expresses love for Edna: “what she felt for Edna was certainly love; it was friendship, and devotion, and collegiality, but it was also love” (85). At the end of the novel, though, we learn that Edna has betrayed Kate, that at the very moment Kate was realizing she loved Edna, Edna was playing Kate for a fool. Because Edna is the only woman in the novel with whom Kate has an ongoing relationship, this betrayal acquires symbolic significance. Ultimately, Kate can depend only on men; the racist male security guard turns out to be a better ally than any woman. A Trap for Fools suggests that all women's friendships are ephemeral at best, sometimes even dangerous, in any case not to be relied upon, an impression I assume Cross did not set out to create and one that undercuts the explicit assertions about friendship in the novel.

Feminism serves the double function of standpoint and theme in all four of these novels, with three of the authors interested in the diversity of feminism. Feminism is a more muted theme in Grafton's novel, where it provides an alternative to the destructive, masculinist values the novel more directly explores. One theme running through A Trap for Fools is feminism's failure to unite black and white women. In The Dog Collar Murders, Wilson examines other divisions among feminists, asking a series of interrelated questions: what, exactly, do women owe each other? should all feminists refuse to participate in social institutions that bar some of our sisters? to what issues should the feminist movement give its attention? is feminism still viable as a movement, or has it broken down irretrievably into numerous factions? Paretsky's Blood Shot asks similar questions, focusing most directly on what women's responsibilities to each other comprise. None of these authors, or their characters, can fully answer the questions they raise, except in the most tentative, temporary ways, but answering the questions “properly” is beside the point: the important thing is to ask the questions, to encourage readers to think about them.

The authors’ interest in asking questions and their willingness to entertain multiple possible answers contribute to the three novels’ openendedness, their refusal of conventional closure. The simpler puzzle of the murder mystery—who did what to whom and why—gets solved in A Trap for Fools, “F” Is for Fugitive, The Dog Collar Murders, and Blood Shot, but the deeper mysteries and the larger questions remain open. The detectives end one or several criminal careers, but the larger social problems the crimes represent are not solved: order is not restored, justice is only minimally served, truth continues to be elusive. Of the three, A Trap for Fools ends most disturbingly, with Kate using the tactics of the oppressors to obtain reparations for the oppressed. She tells her provost that she has “learned a certain amount about blackmail” (153) from her investigation, and then proceeds to blackmail him: in exchange for her cooperation (silence) in keeping the story of embezzling out of the papers, Kate demands that the university establish three large scholarships for poor students in the name of the murdered black student, Arabella. Through exerting this illegitimate form of power, Kate loses her legitimate power. In the final chapter, Kate ceases to speak and to act with feminist authority, abandoning a feminist standpoint and operating instead within the system of power the novel has shown to be corrupt. Like Arabella before her, Kate acts for the “right” reasons, yet can only lose. In another sense, though, Kate wins: she does succeed in making the institution a tiny bit more responsive to the needs of those it usually excludes. Cross implies that all change must take place within existing institutions, and must therefore be incremental; she offers not a vision of revolution, but a realistic description of evolution.

The final full chapter of “F” Is for Fugitive ends, as I have shown, with a question already answered by the novel. However, Grafton also appends an epilogue in the form of a summary report of the case. This epilogue ends with a comment on her relationship with Henry, her motherly landlord:

I find that I'm looking at Henry Pitts differently these days. He may be the closest thing to a father I'll ever have. Instead of viewing him with suspicion, I think I'll enjoy him for the time we have left, whatever that may be.

(261)

The “closest thing to a father” Kinsey has, then, is a male surrogate mother. This conclusion underscores the importance of reinventing relationships, of finding forms of relatedness that avoid the dangerous potentialities of traditional roles.

Both Blood Shot and The Dog Collar Murders end hopefully, in parodies of familiar rituals. Traditionally, women's novels end in the heroine's marriage (or death), while crime novels end in the restoration of order. Paretsky and Wilson revise both genres, “writing beyond the ending” of both romance and crime.⁹ In the last chapter of Blood Shot, V. I. and Caroline, her surrogate little sister, finally manage to achieve an adult understanding. Caroline says that she hopes V. I. will always be her sister, and V. I.'s reply constitutes the book's final line: “Till death do us part, kid” (328). This parody of the marriage service and of hardboiled language (“kid”) resonates deeply, underscoring the novel's theme of women's friendships: sisterhood indeed provides a better, more egalitarian model of relatedness than does marriage, not to mention more freedom for women. This promise of sisterhood does not give the sense of finality, of closure and enclosure, found in novels that end in marriage. Wilson uses a similar tactic in the final pages of The Dog Collar Murders, which describe a “houses-warming” Pam and Hadley give. After deciding to abandon all existing models for relationships and to use instead their own needs as a guide, they buy a duplex that will allow them to live both separately and together. Wilson points the link between the wedding of her first chapter and the houses-warming of her last through Hadley's remark that “this is the nearest we'll get to a wedding.” Pam agrees, thinking

It was a little bit like the wedding reception two months ago. Not as many old neighbors and relatives, but more of the people we counted as friends and family.

(202)

This “houses-warming” revises the traditional ritual of the wedding in a way that parallels these writers’ revision of the conventions of crime fiction: both are counter-traditions, suited to feminist stories and feminist lives.

Notes

1. There has, of course, always been a feminist movement in this century; the dates and texts I cite here are important in terms of popular notice of this movement.

2. Throughout this essay I am building upon the arguments I made first, in more detailed fashion, in Sisters in Crime; for details on the counter-tradition, see 2-17 and 148-49.

3. For analysis of women's characteristic ways of thinking, see Mary Belenky et al.

4. Here I am offering a necessarily sharply abbreviated and greatly simplified version of the highly complex psychoanalytical arguments presented by Benjamin. Chodorow, and Gilligan.

5. Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson thus write in the “different voice” Carol Gilligan has found typical of women's moral decision making.

6. See also Cross's Death in a Tenured Position (1982), in which a woman's isolation among men leads to her suicide.

7. Numerous feminists, especially black feminists, have written on this problem; for a good introduction to the issue see Dill.

8. I am indebted to Sara Ruddick for both term and concept.

9. I have taken this phrase from Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ wonderful book, Writing Beyond the Ending.